Developers had just gotten excited about polygonal graphics, and Sega realized their next system should have that. The irony is that it was their own Virtua Fighter that got developers excited. The problem was, the original Saturn design had 3D capabilities that were barely any better than those of the 32X, and the rumoured capabilities up the then-upcoming SonyPlayStation and Nintendo 64 would have left the Saturn eating dirt.

Instead of redesigning the system to make it powerful enough to handle 3D, Sega just slapped on a duplicate CPU and a duplicate graphics card. This is retroactively ironic, because CPUs with multiple cores are the norm in video game consoles and PCs today, but having entirely separate units just upped the cost and the complexity of the system. The complex hardware setup prevented most game programmers from exploiting its full processing power, though multiple CPUs were nothing new to veteran arcade game developers like Sega, who also adapted the Saturn hardware into their Titan Video (ST-V) arcade board.

While not ironic, the system was also suffering from a legacy of mismanagement from Sega, particularly a lack of communication between Sega of Japan and Sega of America. Sega of Japan launched the Saturn without telling Sega of America, so Sega of America created the 32X and got everyone on the bandwagon of that, took their money, and then they were told that the Sega Saturn was being released. The 32X was soon abandoned, which pissed Sega's customers off. Now, the 32X customers didn't trust Sega, which led to all the 32X customers not buying the Saturn.

One really weird mismanagement was Sonic Team hearing that the team developing the Sonic X-treme was using the engine Sonic Team made for NiGHTS into Dreams.... Sonic Team complained, and the Sonic X-treme developers had to make their own engine, but that wasn't enough and the game was scrapped. First of all, the creators of Sonic didn't want a developer using their own engine to make a Sonic game. That's ironic. It's also retroactively ironic because these days a developer would have to be crazy to stop a game from using a pre-existing engine.

Another odd bit of mismanagement was hiring Bernie Stolar, fresh from being fired by Sony Computer Entertainment America for his draconian and inconsistent policies, directly into the position of CEO for Sega of America. He then proceeded to start up a "five star game" policy (which basically just allowed him to veto whatever he damn well wanted) and basically took the ax to the Saturn. His policies drove away almost all of the American third party developers, blocked a metric ton of high quality games from being released stateside due to his thinly veiled "no 2D" attitude (again ironic, considering that most of the 2D games were miles above the system's 3D games in terms of presentation and general quality), and downplayed the Saturn as being dead in the water, giving the finger to the relatively small but still sizable fanbase. Once again, this was ironic as in the previous console generation, Sega was considered very friendly, supportive, and open with third-party developers, at least in comparison with its main competitor Nintendo.

32 KB save memory with the battery backup. A 128 KB or 512 KB memory cart could be added to supplement this.

Graphics

While the system was listed as having 200,000 fully-textured polygons per second, barely half could be done in real-time games. That was still an impressive amount for the time.

Unlike virtually every other console ever made, the Saturn used quadrilateral (rectangular) shapes in its 3D rendering, rather than the more traditionally used triangles. While this had some notable advantages (reduced texture warping, etc.), quadrilaterals were nothing short of nightmarish to work with in games, even moreso when you considered how hard it was already to create games for the Saturn. Moreover, it made it impossible to do direct ports of games from the PlayStation and Nintendo 64.

Overall, the Saturn could potentially have topped the PlayStation in terms of 3D graphics, but the system didn't last long enough to prove one way or the other.

2D was another story, as the system was built initially with 2D in mind, and save for a few effects, the Saturn was a superior 2D device to the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Too bad it was mainly games in Japan that showed it off, unless it was a Capcomfighting game or a Neo Geo port.

Tropes:

Bald Women: One magazine ad features a woman with rings surrounding her denuded scalp. Likewise, the promotional video (see below) starts off with a bald (and nude) lady with rings encircling her head. Considering how shocking the trope can be, it's a good way to attract attention and invoke the image of Saturn.

Christmas Rushed: The Sega Saturn release in America was pushed forward in an attempt to get a lead on Sony's (then) new console; the PlayStation. This however backfired as developers weren't told (or weren't told soon enough), leaving pretty much nothing (at least, nothing that also wasn't rushed) to actually play on it until four months later, when it was supposed to launch.

Indeed, many retailers were caught by surprise as well: many of them had to scrape by with limited supplies to sell for months, and Sony took advantage of this while preparing for their own launch. In fact, it so angered KB Toys that they actually dropped Sega Saturn from their catalogue altogether.

A lot of developers were also turned off, as they had "Saturnday" (September 9) as the target date of completion for their games and were hoping they could get a piece of the inevitable Launch Day Craze.

Irony: Once the Saturn's American ads finally started advertising it as a gaming system, one of them boasted about how the system had two 32 bit processors while the Playstation only had one. The irony is that those "two 32 bit processors" made the system far more difficult to develop for and played a major role in third party companies favoring the Playstation.

Meaningful Name: The Sega Saturn apparently got its name for being Sega's sixth dedicated home console, counting the SG-1000 II and the Master System (the latter being the revamped international version of the Mark III).

Scapegoat Creator: Bernie Stolar, often blamed for the downfall of the Saturn in America. As you can probably guess...

Misblamed: While Stolar is very much responsible for not allowing many games into the west and pushing the Dreamcast to be released, the rest of Sega of America (including whomever was hired to market the system in the U.S., see below) are just as guilty. In addition, by the time Stolar came, the Sega Saturn was already losing the market and most of the games he refused to allow official releases were niche in the US such as Shmups and dating sims. On the other hand, Stolar's vetoing of Eastern RPGs on the console just when Final Fantasy VII was kicking off the JRPG craze in the west and giving sports titles (a genre that was waning in popularity at that time) a free pass instead is said to be one of the main reasons the Saturn failed.

Stolar's predecessor Tom Kalinske, who ironically was the man that brought Sega out of the dark ages and into the spotlight, is just as much to blame, as it was he who set off the system's stealth launch - the outcome of which is documented above. Not helping matters was his notoriously smug public persona, which people were rapidly growing tired of.

What Were They Selling Again?: The marketing team for the Saturn in the U.S. didn't quite make it well known they were advertising a video game system, let alone the Saturn.

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